I continued by building the basis for my musician creator.
While doing it, I realized that the whole “everyone should be able to look differently”-system will be quite the big undertaking. So I think I’m gonna table that for a later point, when I actually have some sprites created. Otherwise I have to invest a bunch of time into creating a lot of placeholders, just to confirm my thesis, how this is gonna work. I do have the basic system built, but there is just some optimization that I have to look into, so that each musician isn’t built sprite-by-sprite in every rendering. I mean, in a sense, that isn’t circumventable in any case, but at least I should be able to not repeat a huge junk of code in a lot of places, and just be able to store the information on who gets what sprites for which animation somewhere central.
Maybe I make that “later point” come sooner*, and I’ll spend some time making actual sprites in the near future, so I can work on this system further. So far I kinda pushed back everything that included working on the actual sprites, as I felt like this is like the last - but probably longest - step of this development. Like, when everything works, I spend a year making it all look good… But it might be smart to do some in-between phases, where I don’t program as much and spend some time in photoshop creating assets. That will probably keep me from going crazy later on.
Oh, and as you can see, I made the first “real walls”. To get them to actually overlay my musicians, I had to rework my render-object a little bit and create a wall-object for these kinds of walls. The way it works, it creates instances of the wall every step and deletes them right after. That’s the only way I could put them into my priority queue together with the musicians, so that they get depth-layered the right way. Something deep inside me tells me that this will mess up performance later on, but it works for now…
*UPDATE:
I did create some assets to actually test the system decently. So a few hours later, the musician creator now looks like this:
